A weblog for students engaged in doctoral studies in the field of human rights. It is intended to provide information about contemporary developments, references to new publications and material of a practical nature.

Wednesday, 6 April 2016

The death penalty: Is the glass half full or half empty?

Amnesty International today issued its 2016 report on
capital punishment. The thorough annual reports by Amnesty International have
been produced for many years. They enable comparisons to be made and trends to
be identified.

The ‘headline’ on Amnesty’s website is ‘Dramatic Rise In Executions’. It is a gloomy and discouraging message. I expect this story will run in the media around the world.

This may be a case of debating whether a glass is half empty
or half full. As the report indicates, the dramatic increase is due to three
countries: Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In 2014, the three accounted for
386 executions. In 2015, they were responsible for 1,451 executions. It is a
huge and terrifying increase. As Amnesty recognizes, these three states
generate 89% of the total executions on the planet (with the exception of
China, which Amnesty does not include in its statistics because nothing
official is available).

But there is another much more hopeful message in the
Amnesty data.

If the very peculiar and grotesque cases of Iran, Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia are excluded from the total, we actually see a rather stunning decline
in the death penalty throughout the world. I looked at Amnesty’s reports over
the past six years, calculating the total number of executions but without counting Iran,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Here is the result

2010248

2011234

2012288

2013330

2014223

2015179

In other words, excluding those three very nasty countries,
the number of executions in the world has never been lower. The decline in 2015
is nothing if not dramatic. If we look at the average for the previous five
years, it is 264 executions per annum. The total of 179 for 2015 represents a drop
of more than 30% compared with the average for the previous five years. Wow!

Some of this might be explained by the shrinking subject matter. In effect, there are fewer countries that apply the death penalty today than there were in 2010. But the difference is not that great. In 2010, Amnesty said that 95 states had abolished the death penalty in law., and that 139 had abolished it in either law or in practice. This year, the total is 102 for those that have abolished it in law, and 140 for those that have abolished it in law or in practice. That might explain a slight reduction, but not a 30% drop. The conclusion must be that most of the States that retain the death penalty actually use it significantly less than they did at the beginning of the decade.

China is excluded, of course. Since 2010, Amnesty has
not even attempted to guess at the number of executions in China. It is
probably several thousand per annum. Our information on China is entirely
anecdotal, but it seems consistent with the general trend rather than with that of the three anomalous countries. There can be little doubt that China has greatly
reduced its resort to capital punishment in recent years.

The Editorial Team

W. Schabas, Y. McDermott, J. Powderly, N. Hayes

William A. Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London. He is also professor of international criminal law and human rights at Leiden University, emeritus professor human rights law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights of the National University of Ireland Galway, and an honorary professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing and Wuhan University. He is the author of more than 20 books and 300 journal articles, on such subjects as the abolition of capital punishment, genocide and the international criminal tribunals. Professor Schabas was a member of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in Human Rights and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He serves as president of the Irish Branch of the International Law Association chair of the Institute for International Criminal Investigation. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Here is the full c.v.

Dr YvonneMcDermott is Senior Lecturer in Law at Bangor University, UK, where she is also Director of Teaching and Learning and Co-Director of the Bangor Centre for International Law. Yvonne is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway (B. Corp. Law, LL.B.), Leiden University (LL.M. cum laude) and the Irish Centre for Human Rights (Ph.D.). Her research focuses on fair trial rights, international criminal procedure and international criminal law. She is the author of Fairness in International Criminal Trials (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Niamh Hayes has been the Head of Office for the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI) in The Hague since September 2012. She is about to complete her Ph.D. on the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence by international criminal tribunals at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway. She previously worked for Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice as a legal consultant, and as an intern for the defence at the ICTY in the Karadzic case. She has lectured on international criminal law and international law at Trinity College Dublin and, along with Prof. William Schabas and Dr. Yvonne McDermott, is a co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to International Criminal Law: Critical Perspectives (Ashgate, 2013). She is the author of over 45 case reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law and has published numerous articles and book chapters on the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence as international crimes.

Joseph Powderly is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. Between September 2008 and January 2010, he was a Doctoral Fellow/Researcher at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, where he worked, among other projects, on a Irish Government-funded investigation and report into the possible perpetration of crimes against humanity against the Rohingya people of North Rakhine State, Burma/Myanmar. He is currently in the process of completing his doctoral research which looks at the impact of theories of judicial interpretation on the development of international criminal and international humanitarian law. The central thesis aims to identify and analyze the potential emergence of a specific theory of interpretation within the sphere of judicial creativity. Along with Dr. Shane Darcy of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, he is co-editor of and contributor to the edited collection Judicial Creativity in International Criminal Tribunals which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. He has written over 80 case-reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law, as well as numerous book chapters and academic articles on topics ranging from the principle of complementarity to Irish involvement in the drafting of the Geneva Conventions. In December 2010, he was appointed Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Criminal Law Forum. His research interests while focusing on international criminal and international humanitarian law also include topics such as the history of international law and freedom of expression.

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Interested in PhD studies in human rights?

Students interested in pursuing a doctorate in the field of human rights are encouraged to explore the possibility of working at Middlesex University under the supervision of Professor William A. Schabas and his colleagues. For inquiries, write to: w.schabas@mdx.ac.uk.